Klustar (Game Boy Color)

Block-dropping puzzle games often feature an area referred to as the well, this being the boundaries all the blocks drop into. Filling the well to the top leads in failure and areas outside of the well are often used for showing important information like your current score and an upcoming piece. Klustar on the Game Boy Color though has no well to speak of despite being a block-dropping puzzler. In fact, it completely avoids any on screen borders entirely, instead the edges of the screen being the limits of where pieces can appear. While this opens up new ways to play, it also leads to some of the limitations that make it hard for Klustar to find its footing.

 

In a round of Klustar you play as a single small square that can move freely around a flat and empty space. Blocks will begin to fly in from the borders of the screen one at a time, each of these made up of 4 or 5 squares each depending on which setting you pick and taking on different shapes. To earn points and survive the player will need to intercept the flight path of these blocks, the block sticking to the square and becoming part of the growing mass of the cluster. The cluster will continue to grow as more blocks stick to it and the game will end when the cluster is so big that it a full line of blocks in its mass spans from left to right or from top to bottom making it impossible to move it any further. However, you can eliminate mass from the cluster by making squares of different sizes within the cluster’s body. The smallest square that will eliminate some blocks is a 3X3 shape, but if you want a more difficult session you can change the minimum size such a square needs to be to 4X4 or 5X5. Play will grow faster the longer you last and you can choose different starting levels to kick things off at different speeds. However you play though Game Type 1 is mostly one of survival, the player trying to rotate and move the cluster about to intercept blocks and make squares to clear away mass for as many points as possible before they lose. Game Type 2 on the other hand is one about clearing out a set amount of blocks before you win, the rules otherwise unchanged.

For a quick bit of play, Klustar’s concept is entertaining enough. The player needs to consider the shape of their cluster and rotate and move it to intercept incoming blocks in a way that can work towards making a clean square that will wipe away some of that unwieldy mass. As you make progress though, the exact shape of the incoming blocks will become more difficult to integrate by design. Starting off you’ll get simple contiguous shapes like lines, squares, and t-shapes, but soon you’ll get pieces with deliberate disruptions like an open spot in their middle or an x shape where the squares within only touch each other diagonally. Unless your cluster is already in a convenient shape to accept these they will add a break in the cluster that will heavily impede square building efforts and can make a large amount of mass essentially inaccessible unless you can clear out the outer layer of your cluster, and this can have a ripple effect as more and more inconvenient pieces stretch these boundaries further out. Having the entirety of the screen to work with means that you aren’t doomed the moment such pieces throw off your work and some complications are important to adding some difficulty to the play, but rotation becomes hard to conceptualize thanks to the lack of borders as well. Due to the dimensions of the Game Boy Color’s screen, a cluster can only be 18 squares tall before you’ll lose but can be 20 wide before a loss and the rotation is based on the position of the central square so sometimes flipping all the mass only works if you shove the cluster into the right area of the screen. In a game that is also asking you to manage incoming blocks that fly on rigidly set straight paths you won’t have much time to set up such vital rotations, meaning that trying to set things up for a larger square clear is often far too risky to attempt.

 

Luckily this mostly impacts the late game and there is still a fair bit of time where smart play can ensure your survival in Klustar, and there are a few elements in place to make it more likely you’ll keep playing before you hit the portion where your cluster is nearing the point of no return. If you do let a piece slip by your collection of blocks you will actually be able to continue playing, but that block will now solidify into a barrier on the edge of the screen. This will make those later parts even more difficult of course and it is often better to grab every incoming piece, but it does mean you aren’t doomed if your shape is becoming a little difficult to maneuver. One complication to maneuvering is the fact that the automatically moving blocks you need to intercept can appear in the corners of the screen meaning you can only attach them to your cluster at the extremities of your current shape. Rather than being able to integrate it in a spot it fits you’ll have to latch it onto a part that could be disrupted by this unfortunately flying block, this complication feeling a little less fair than the oddly shapes pieces that appear once you reach later levels since you are given too few options of dealing with it. However, an unusual trick in your arsenal can make building your cluster a bit easier if you’re feeling bold. When a piece is flying in you can intercept it before its full shape has appeared on screen, and if it sticks to your cluster before its full body appears, the parts of it that were off-screen completely disappear. With this a block that is five squares in size can be sheared down to one or two with no penalty, and while you won’t know in advance if the piece would have been troublesome if you had seen its full length, you can try to safely fill out the edges of a cluster with this trick.

Information like the current speed level and score only appear after a square is made and mass is eliminated, but there is another detail involved in the mass clearing process that is helpful albeit a little confusing. Once that big uninterrupted block of squares has disappeared, any remaining pieces on the cluster will move inwards towards the central square. This does seem like a smart way to ensure there aren’t huge gaps in your form and these can lead to squares of their own that clear out even more of the cluster’s mass, but the way this unfolds doesn’t always make sense. Sometimes the pieces that tumble towards the middle will still leave gaps, other times the tumble will happen in a part of the cluster that shouldn’t have been impacted by disappearance of other blocks, and in general it makes it impossible to really predict if you’ll get a combo of squares. The unpredictability can work to your advantage of course as luck can be on your side with the way the squares rearrange themselves, but there’s no real sense of gravity since you’re a rotating amalgamation of shapes that has no real defined top or bottom. Going for a high score ends up being about endurance rather than setting up flashy chains of square clears, but that isn’t necessarily a negative since survival does seem to be the primary challenge of Klustar rather than building up a score it usually hides from view.

 

Klustar contains an option where a round of play can start with more than just the central square already in play, the game letting you pick different size ranges for your chunky cluster to start as. Since the game can’t provide a shape that will already have a 3X3 square match though, this does mean you start with a lot of those empty spaces in your form that make most of your mass hard to use, but this is a form of difficulty differentiation you are in control of so it can be used if you want something deliberately challenging or want to better learn how to handle a cluster in an unfortunate shape. Developing your reflexes for quick and smart movement does make a round of Klustar last longer and it can be decent fun to make as many square matches as you can before certain design choices start to hamper the longevity of the game. A simple multiplayer mode also exists so that direct competition with someone else can lead to a more speed focused approach to play, but perhaps the oddest aspect of Klustar is its choice of music. While fellow block-dropping puzzler Tetris managed to make its versions of Russian folk music into memorable hits, Klustar attempts to do so with American folk music, and the likes of Home on the Range, Yankee Doodle, and When Johnny Comes Marching Home will play during the action. These aren’t selected on the menus before a round though, instead the song changing after the player has survived for long enough for it to shift to a new track. The musical progression is a good way of breaking up some monotony and even giving you a sense of how well you’re doing that won’t disappear like the actual scores and level numbers do, but these don’t quite work as thinking music or tense accompaniments for when things start to escalate.

THE VERDICT: Klustar’s concept of a gradually growing cluster of blocks you need to shape into solid squares to clear works at times, but the overall concept is held back by a quite few ideas that weren’t really thought out. The reflexes and spatial awareness needed to build a cluster that can be cleared efficiently enough to survive are challenged by unusual piece shapes and increasing speed in adequate ways, but the areas blocks can appear from and the unpredictable rearranging of your mass after a clear make it hard to do any long term planning for high scores. The odd choice to play American folk music and rarely presenting information about your progress gives the straightforward play an unusual air, but mostly Klustar feels like it came up with a block dropping concept without considering the ways it could go awry, making a game that is decent to play for a while but not as addicting as something where the player has more control over their fate.

 

And so, I give Klustar for Game Boy Color…

An OKAY rating. Klustar is a little too rigid to really make the most of its concept. Since the player is only able to integrate blocks into their cluster’s mass by intercepting a piece’s path there are moments where you are given a piece that interrupts work in far too disruptive of a manner, but if you could just smack your cluster into the pieces from any angle to stick them to the whole then you’d be given more flexibility for dealing with blocks that are coming in from unfortunate areas like the corner spots. Naturally a better fix would have those areas ineligible for pieces flying in since already having disruptive shapes feels like a more intelligent and fair complication to play, the player able to better respond to an odd new block shape since they can attach it where they please rather than being forced to append an errant piece to their cluster’s outer limits. The lack of proper boundaries does allow for the shape of your cluster to reach a large size that can lead to those moments of near misses and barely clinched survivals that can inject some excitement, but it also hides key information and concepts like blocking an incoming piece from fully appearing would have more value if you could see which piece was coming next. There is a menu option at the start to influence the direction pieces come in from that can add some element of predictability to play so it’s not complete guesswork with such a setting enabled.

 

Klustar does mostly feel like a block-dropper where the concept was conceived but then not really refined, making it fine for some idle play but not really the kind of game that’s going to hook you. Hiding the score most of the time minimizes the investment in trying to build it up and having pieces enter in ways that can’t really be strategized around also limits a player’s feeling of control over their fate. Klustar is built to be dabbled in rather than become your new puzzle game of choice for killing time, and its basics do provide an enjoyable enough endurance challenge, but Klustar isn’t built to last and so you’ll likely gravitate to a more substantial and better defined block-dropper if you’re looking for something worth a long term investment.